Tuesday, December 31, 2013

For those of you who have lost their
jobs or lost their homes or lost their food stamps or lost their
unemployment you will be glad to know:

Fueled by the Fed's easy money policies
and an improving economy, U.S. stocks are poised to close their best
year since 1995. Prior to the final day of trading for 2013, the Dow
was up 29% when dividends are included and the S&P 500 32%.

AND:

Private-equity firms are set to return
over $120B to their investors for this year, surpassing the 2012
record of $115B, Cambridge Associates estimates. The P-E sector has
been assisted by low interest rates, which have helped P-E backed
companies sell $66.2B worth of debt in 2013 to fund dividends to
their owners, up from $64.2B a year earlier.

The rich DO get richer while the poor
get poorer. The inequality of our system is showing quite well.

Now all you have to do is survive until
it trickles down. But, don't hold your breath!

Sunday, December 15, 2013

From
a recent 188-page reportby
the World Health Organization come these ghastly and appalling
factoids:

Suicide
rates rose 40% in the first six months of 2011 alone.

Murder
has doubled.

9,100
doctors in Greece, roughly one out of every seven, have been laid
off.

Joining
those doctors in joblessness are 27.6% of the entire Greek labor
force. By comparison, in the depths of the Great Depression,
unemployment in the United States peaked at a lower percentage than
that. Among Greek young adults under 25 years old, unemployment
reached an abominable 64.9% in May. (Yet the unemployment rate in
Greece was as low as 7% as recently as 2008.)

I'm
sure that my Tea Party friends will blame universal healthcare, paid
sick leave and "generous" unemployment benefits for this
catastrophe. "If we simply stopped helping people, then they
wouldn't need our help," they would say. You can see where that
"logic" leads. The dead need no help whatsoever, except
possibly burial. Sort of like this: "The Republican healthcare
plan: Don't Get Sick. And if you do get sick, Die Quickly."]

Maybe
you think that I'm kidding about what my Tea Party friends would do.
I'm not. A few years ago here in Florida, we had a children's health
insurance program called KidCare, with a waiting list of over
100,000. The Tea Party Republicans didn't like that. So they
eliminated the waiting list.

But
back to Greece. A lot of people blame Greek government debt for the
current suffering. According to the Central Intelligence Agency, that
most authoritative of all conceivable sources, Greek government debt
stands at 160% of GDP, which seems like a lot. But Japanese
government debt stands at 215% of GDP, and the unemployment rate in
Japan is only 4%.

Moreover,
Spain's unemployment rate is virtually as high as Greece's, but
Spain's government debt stands at only 85% of GDP. That's less debt
than Singapore's, and Singapore's unemployment rate is 1.8%.

So
we cannot properly attribute the catastrophe in Greece to labor
protection, nor can we attribute it to government borrowing. What is
the cause, then? The World Health Organization has the answer:
austerity. "Austerity" is a bloodless term for gross
economic mismanagement, animated by heartlessness. That robotic
cut-cut-cut mentality that deprives us of jobs, of public services,
of safety, of health, of infrastructure, of help for the needy, and
-- ultimately -- of our economic equilibrium and the ability to
survive. The mentality that ushers in, and welcomes, a vicious war of
all against all. Austerity is destroying an entire country, right
before our eyes.

Or,
as the World Health Organization put it: "These adverse trends
in Greece pose a warning to other countries undergoing significant
fiscal austerity, including Spain, Ireland and Italy. It also
suggests that ways need to be found for cash-strapped governments to
consolidate finances without undermining much-needed investments in
health."

In
America, we have a rich and powerful lobby that has the same
prescription for every economic malady: austerity. Cut-cut-cut. Cut
Social Security and Medicare. Cut teacher and police and firefighter
jobs. Cut health care. Cut pay and cut pensions. It all boils down to
that one ugly word: austerity. And austerity always brings disarray,
disaster, decay and death.

People
often ask me my position on various issues. Well, I'm for certain
things, and I'm against others. But on one issue, I'm very
consistent. I'm against pain and suffering. Especially avoidable pain
and suffering. And therefore, I'm against austerity. It begins with
seemingly innocuous budget cuts. It then leads inexorably to the
destruction of countless lives.

Why
am I telling you about Greece? In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote a book
called "It
Can't Happen Here."
But it can. And it's up to us to prevent it.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

All those younger years I looked forward to the day when I would be "grown up". We were all small when we were young and we always looked up to the older folks. We anticipated the future when we would be "grown-up"and be able to do the things we wanted to do without anybody else's approval. We went to school and studied and eventually got jobs where we learned more duties, all part of "growing up".

I did my part, I studied, I worked, I tried to fit the part of a grown up. The years flew by and here I sit in front of my computer looking back. I grew up. But somewhere along the line, things changed and I started growing down. For some inexplicable reason, my stature has diminished – my spine has compressed, and I'm shorter than I was. I have grown down instead of up. I don't know how to act as a grown-down. All my life I wanted to be a grown-up and worked hard to become one. Now that I'm a grown-down, I'm not sure how to act or what to do.

I'm pretty sure that a grown-down walks a little slower, and keeps his eye on the ground in front of him. He walks a little more stoop-shouldered but has a pretty good idea of where he's going. A grown-down doesn't have to put on airs. He's satisfied with who he is and what he has done. He has thought through his philosophy of life and knows what he knows and you can't change his mind. Clothes hang a little different on his grown-down body, but he's not as worried about his appearance as he was when he was younger. He doesn't have to impress people any longer.

I tried to find some books and reference materials about grown-downs, but there isn't much out there. I think the grown-downs have figured it out and don't want to share the answers. They just want to be left alone to live comfortably now that they've reached this point in their lives. I know I'm more content with what I've got, and I'm quite comfortable looking back over the memories I've created during my lifetime. I think most grown downs have a tendency to look back about as much as they look forward. Pleasant memories that reside in your brain are like a good book that you can come back to and reread any time you wish – complete with sounds and picture.

My daughter tells me that I'm really not a grown-down. I'm more of a worn-down. Perhaps she's right. I've had a lot of my rough edges smoothed over, and I'm not as frisky as I used to be. I don't take as many chances as I did once, and I don't recover quite as quickly as I did when I was younger. My mind still seems to be pretty sharp, but parts of my body have retired before some of the others. My mind tells me to do something, but my body says "no way". So I suppose I'm more of a worn-down-grown-down, which is still perhaps a bit better than being an up-and-coming grown-up. So all of you grown downs out there, just sit back and relax and go with the flow. There is no hurry and there is nowhere you have to go – just be.

Friday, November 22, 2013

I remember that day. Friday afternoon
the head of my department came into the room and announced that the
President had been shot. He sent everyone home for the rest of the
day. Nobody knew exactly what was happening. We were all is a state
of shock that something like this could happen in the United States
to our young and vibrant President. I spent that whole weekend glued
to the old black and white television that continuously reported on
the events taking place in Dallas and later in Washington. The whole
country watched the memorial and the burial and the killing of
Oswald. The whole country stopped for that week after the
assassination and watched. We watched as the Vice President Lyndon
Johnson, who we really didn't even know, took over the reins of the
federal bureaucracy. We watched John John as he saluted his father's
casket. We watched as the Kennedys gathered sadly and stone faced.
We waited to see who had been up on the grassy knoll behind the
fence. We wondered how one man could have been so accurate so
quickly to hit the moving cars. I think most everyone assumed it was
a hit squad covering the route from several points. It had us all
watching and waiting and sadly missing President Jack Kennedy.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Saturday, November 09, 2013

I'm now in the elder state of life. I, and my fellow elders, can
now remember a world that is no more. My father used to tell me of a
world before I came of open prairies and clean, clear streams. He
missed the fenceless open pasture of central Kansas and the
unpolluted streams that you could drink from. I never knew that
world, so I didn't miss it. I remember a world of small farms and
small towns with local and state highways connecting them. I
remember drives into the country through town squares and country
cafes and burma-shave adds and telephone poles along each road. I
remember one car families with empty streets during the day. I
remember stay at home mothers caring for their kids after school.
Before television, we would play outside a lot and in the evening we
would listen to radio programs. Neighbors all looked out for each
other and their kids. There were neighborhood markets and dime
stores and drug stores and movie theaters all withing walking
distance. Milk was delivered by the milk man and bread was delivered
by the Manor man. When it snowed, some of the hilly streets were
closed off from traffic and the children went sledding in the
streets. There were no shopping centers, no Kmarts, no Walmarts, no
chain drug stores, no super markets, no Home Depots. There were no
visa or mastercard credit cards. You had to establish credit with
each store you shopped in or with money loaned to you by the bank or
cash on hand. You had a local gas station where they also worked on
cars. All the local stores hired young kids to help on a part time
basis which gave a young person their first taste of employment and
cash management. Music was only available over AM stations and there
was no stereo. It wasn't until the development of transistors that
there were portable radios available. Television, when it came, was
only in black and white and only on in the evenings to start with.
Air conditioning was only available in movie theaters and ice cream
parlors. There were no fast food restaurants, only cafes and a few
drive-ins. Any after school activities had to be within walking
distance because dad had the family car to go to work and mom was at
home doing the laundry, without a dryer, or preparing dinner, without
a microwave or prepackaged food, or doing dishes, without a
dishwasher. Clothes were not wrinkle free and had to be ironed by
hand. Houses were left open during the warm season to help cool and
they needed to be dusted quite often. Before oil burners and gas
burning furnaces coal had to be stored in the coal bin and shoveled
into the furnace daily. The coal deposited a fine black dust on
clothes that had to be washed off. Before calculators and computers
there were comptometers to add up figures for offices and many people
were employed at comptometer operators. Engineers used sliderules
and books of logarithmic tables to help calculate. There were no
copy machines, so people used carbon paper to make copies of what
they were writing or typing. Typewriters were all manual (no
electric) and any mistakes had to be dealt with on the original as
well as the carbon copies. Records were only available on 78 rpm
hard plastic disks before 45 rpm and eventually 33 1/3 rpm vinyl
disks were invented. There were reel-to-reel recorders available,
but very expensive. 8 track and cassette player/recorders came along
later. Later yet, CDs and DVDs and digital recording became
available. Before jet planes, the constellation was the largest
airliner used to fly between cities. Planes and trains were the
fastest way to travel across the country because there were no
interstate highways.

These are some of my memories of a world that no longer exists and
that younger folks would not recognize. Their memories will be of a
different world. Whose world is better? Who really knows? Things
change, some for the good – some for the bad. I like my memories,
I liked my world. Some things have gotten easier and the world has
become more instant and seems smaller. But that's my viewpoint, from
one of the elders.

Monday, November 04, 2013

We're cutting back on food stamps and head start and education and medicaid, but not on our Miltary-Industrial-Complex.

During
World War II, this nation converted its civilian manufacturing base
into the creation of weapons and military equipment. However, the
arms industry did not revert back to its original functions upon the
war’s end; instead, it continued to grow and expand. The Cold War
did much to precipitate the amount of money our government was
spending on the arms race and to counter the Soviet threat. Today,
the U.S. spends fifty cents out of every discretionary tax dollar on
war and militarism. We spend almost as much on the military as the
rest of the world combined, and we are by far the largest arms
exporter in the world, accounting for 78% of such sales. Russia is in
second place with 5.6%.

The
term “Military Industrial Complex” was first coined by President
Eisenhower in 1961 during his farewell
address to the nation to
describe the unprecedented American arms industry coupled with an
immense military establishment. He warned us to “...guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the
disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

The
military aid that the U.S. “gives” to other countries comes in
the way of credits which can only be used to purchase U.S. weapons
systems, equipment and training. The cost of those aid credits comes
directly out of the pockets of the American taxpayer and right into
the bank accounts of the defense industry. The U.S. provides around
$50 billion dollars in aid annually to over 150 nations, with at
least $17 billion of that being military aid. Our foreign military
aid programs keep the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) machine well
oiled and running smoothly; with big profits for the likes of
Lockheed Martin and Boeing, all courtesy of American taxpayers.

The
“rise of misplaced power” that Eisenhower warned of is easily
seen by the influence the Military Industrial Complex has on Congress
and the decisions it makes about war, budgeting, and foreign policy.
Defense firms spend millions lobbying Congress to protect their
weapons programs from spending cuts and to promote military actions.
Senators who voted in favor of a military strike against Syria
received an average of 83
percent more moneyfrom
the defense industry than senators who voted against the resolution.

When
chemical weapons were used to kill civilians in Syria recently, the
U.S. was quick to say that President Assad had violated international
law. But instead of referring the case to the International Criminal
Court for adjudication, the Obama administration came very close to
waging war.

The
United Nations charter prohibits the threat or use of force against
any other country except in the event of self defense, yet in just
the last 12 years the U.S. has launched two full-blown wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan and we have attacked Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia with
hellfire missiles launched from drones. We have used the two most
recent wars to justify the use of torture, external rendition and
indefinite detention, as well as multiple violations of the Geneva
Conventions.

In
addition to refusal to become a party to the International Criminal
Court, a permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide,
crimes against humanity and war crimes
,
the U.S. has also refused to sign on to the Landmine Treaty, the
Cluster Munitions Treaty, the Biological and Toxin Weapons
Convention, the Convention against Torture, and the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty. Even though the Chemical Weapons Convention was
ratified, the U.S. set extensive limitations on how it could be
applied in the U.S., essentially gutting its provisions.

Since
1961 we have built a foreign policy through fear, intimidation, and
coercion. We have ignored opportunities to join the international
community and have instead shown arrogance and disregard for other
nations and their peoples. We espouse support for human rights, but
ignore them in the interest of corporate profits.

Monday, October 28, 2013

“Corporations, freed from all laws, government regulations and
internal constraints, are stealing as much as they can, as fast as
they can, on the way down. The managers of corporations no longer
care about the effects of their pillage. Many expect the systems they
are looting to fall apart. They are blinded by personal greed and
hubris. They believe their obscene wealth can buy them security and
protection. They should have spent a little less time studying
management in business school and a little more time studying human
nature and human history. They are digging their own graves.

Our shift to corporate totalitarianism, like the shift to all
forms of totalitarianism, is incremental. Totalitarian systems ebb
and flow, sometimes taking one step back before taking two steps
forward, as they erode democratic liberalism. This process is now
complete. The “consent of the governed” is a cruel joke. Barack
Obama cannot defy corporate power any more than George W. Bush or
Bill Clinton could. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, Bush, who
is intellectually and probably emotionally impaired, did not
understand the totalitarian process abetted by the presidency.
Because Clinton and Obama, and their Democratic Party, understand the
destructive roles they played and are playing, they must be seen as
far more cynical and far more complicit in the ruination of the
country. Democratic politicians speak in the familiar
“I-feel-your-pain” language of the liberal class while allowing
corporations to strip us of personal wealth and power. They are
effective masks for corporate power.

The corporate state seeks to maintain the fiction of our personal
agency in the political and economic process. As long as we believe
we are participants, a lie sustained through massive propaganda
campaigns, endless and absurd election cycles and the pageantry of
empty political theater, our corporate oligarchs rest easy in their
private jets, boardrooms, penthouses and mansions. As the bankruptcy
of corporate capitalism and globalization is exposed, the ruling
elite are increasingly nervous. They know that if the ideas that
justify their power die, they are finished. This is why voices of
dissent—as well as spontaneous uprisings such as the Occupy
movement—are ruthlessly crushed by the corporate state.“

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/our_invisible_revolution_20131028

Just for reference, Under Bill Clinton,
NAFTA came into being resulting in a major shift of manufacturing
from the United States to Asian countries and the dismantling of
banking controls under the Glass–Steagall act.
Under Barack Obama the TPP is being pushed through and stronger
security controls are being foisted upon the population
while the wealth of the nation is being siphoned into the pockets of
the super-rich. Dissent and whistle-blowing is being crushed and our
privacy is being shredded. Can this all be happenstance and
ignorantly ignored as coincidence?

And all this happening under Democratic
presidency. Think how much worse it would probably have been under
Republican. We, the working poor, have been led down this path
unknowingly by our leaders under the supervision of the super-rich.
They have accomplished much during our lifetime. We can only start
to slowly divest them of their controls with a united front.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

What we have now, prior to Obamacare,
is medical care for only those who can afford it and the rest can
die. Obamacare is a start, albeit a flawed one. The drug companies
and medical equipment suppliers and insurance companies all end up as
winners under Obamacare. They will be able to secure even greater
profits from their government-provided patent monopolies since the
ACA does little to rein in costs. As a result, we will still be
paying close to twice as much for drugs and medical devices as people
in other wealthy countries that have national healthcare overseen by
their governments. The agenda now has to be to squeeze the parasites
out of the health care system and bring down the costs.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Millions of Americans have absolutely
no confidence that the U.S. House or Senate is even remotely
concerned about their needs or views.

Here’s the truth. The middle class
in this country is collapsing. The number of Americans living in
poverty is nearly the highest on record and the gap between the very
rich and everyone else is growing wider and wider. And very few
people in Washington give a damn.

Year after year the
American people have begged the Congress and the president to move
aggressively to protect the middle class from total collapse. And, so
far, their leaders have failed to act. Today, the American
people are demanding action to create jobs for their kids and
retirement security for their parents.

They are deeply worried
about the state of the economy, and they have every reason to worry.
Here’s what’s going on:

Real unemployment: Counting those
who have given up looking for work and those who are working
part-time when they need a full time job, the real
unemployment rate is 13.7 percent, not 7.3 percent.

Average wages: Non-supervisory
workers have seen their wages go down by eight cents an hour since
the beginning of the so-called recovery and are now a paltry $8.77
an hour.

Income and wealth inequality: From
2009-2012, the richest 1 percent of Americans captured 95 percent of
all new income, while the typical middle class family has seen their
income go down by more than $2,100. The Walton family, the owners of
Wal-Mart, are worth more than $100 billion and own more wealth than
the bottom 40 percent of Americans.

College unaffordability: Over the
past 30 years, the cost of a college education has gone up by more
than 250 percent. The average American graduating from college this
year is drowning in debt of more than $35,000. Even worse, hundreds
of thousands of high school graduates are unable to go to college
each and every year not because they are unqualified, but because
they can’t afford it.

Childhood poverty: We live in the richest country in the
world, yet one out of five children in the U.S. is stuck in poverty.
And the reality is that children living in poverty in America today
are more likely to stay in poverty when they grow up than in any
other advanced country on earth.

The lesson to be learned from the widespread opposition to the war
is that the American people standing together can make a difference.
Building on that momentum, NOW IS THE
TIME to demand that Congress create millions of
decent-paying jobs repairing our crumbling roads, bridges, dams,
culverts, schools and housing.

We need to end our dependence
on dirty fossil fuels that are threatening the planet and move toward
energy efficiency and renewable energy. We must increase the minimum
wage to at least $10.10 an hour and lift millions of Americans out of
poverty. We must fundamentally rewrite our trade policy so that
American products, not American jobs, are our No. 1 export. We must
stand up to the greed on Wall Street by breaking up too-big-to-fail
banks that have done so much damage to the economy. And, we must make
college affordable so that every qualified American can get the
education they need to reclaim the American dream.

Friday, August 16, 2013

John Jay, the president of the Continental Congress, then first
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, enunciated in the Constitutional
Convention that "those who own the country ought to govern it".
That has been the thinking of the Republican Party ever since they
started.

In the past, the United States has sometimes, kind of
sardonically, been described as a one-party state: the business party
with two factions called Democrats and Republicans. That's no longer
true. It's still a one-party state, the business party. But it only
has one faction. The faction is moderate Republicans, who are now
called Democrats. There are virtually no moderate Republicans in
what's called the Republican Party and virtually no liberal Democrats
in what's called the Democratic Party. It's basically a party of what
would be moderate Republicans and similarly, Richard Nixon would be
way at the left of the political spectrum today. Eisenhower would be
in outer space.

The wealthy have reclaimed the nation and are running it the way
they want it run. Of the wealthy, by the wealth and for the wealthy.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

I've
given up on democrats and liberals. I've given up on electoral
change. Public banking could be the straw that breaks the corporatist
camel's back. North Dakota has had it for over 80 years. Many nations
have it. There are a few states or cities that are getting close to
instituting it.

Big
corporations are the biggest threat to the future of the human
race... period.The
TPP Trans Pacific Partnership, will confer nation state status on
corporations. Obama is pushing this and the congress is ready to let
it happen.

Here
in the US, the people must take their country back from the
military/financial/medico-Pharma/Agra/prison/fossil fuel energy
complex.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

I wasn't there, you weren't there - at
the trial. The jury was there and heard all the evidence.

Many forget but the initial prosecutor
refused to take this case because it was clear there was not the
evidence to support charging Zimmerman. It turned out he was right.
But political forces and people who suddenly had the bright lights
turned on them were not going to care about true justice. Instead
they dumped that prosecutor and found someone who would take this
case.

The fact that the stand your ground law appears to have been
abused in Florida may indeed be an argument that has validity and
something that needs to be addressed. But it does not mean that
George Zimmerman is guilty. In fact, he did not even use the stand
your ground defense.
The fact that this case has revealed the gross misconduct of
prosecutors across this country in over charging and over reaching
could very well be a good thing; especially if something is finally
done about it. But it does not mean that George Zimmerman is guilty.
The sad truth is that this was one of the most poorly handled
cases we have seen in recent years.

By the time we got to the defense case,
the prosecution had already conceded that it was Martin who was the
aggressor, not Zimmerman.

Justice and the law dictated the
verdict. That's what the trial demanded.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

I was talking with Zachary, my
grandson, this morning. I realized as we were talking that he was
looking forward to the most of his life, and I was looking back on
most of mine. We each had our own perspective of what was important,
but it differed depending on the viewpoint. I've tried to counsel
him about what was important, the things that I have learned in life
that might affect him. He couldn't see the problems facing him as
well as I could and will probably have to learn by trial and error
like I did. I was hoping that I could share some of the things I had
learned and help him to avoid some of the mistakes that I had made
during my lifetime. But it seems that each of us can only learn from
our own mistakes and can't effectively utilize knowledge impressed
upon us by others. I will keep trying to convey solutions that I
have discovered, and perhaps by repetition, and some of that
knowledge will eke its way into his brain. I know the world is
different now than it was when I was young and perhaps some of the
things I learned won't be applicable in today's world, but I'm sure
that some of those things I've learned can be used. Today's world is
so instantly communicable and news is so up to the minute that
everyone feels in direct contact with what's going on the world. In
my youth. We learned so much of the news long after it had happened
and felt a bit distant from the rest of the world. Our world was
more local and the things that concerned us were within reach. Male
took days to reach us and telephones were fixed to the household and
we couldn't be reached when we were away from home. We had to be
prepared to deal with any emergency without someone else's help. Now
with the advent of cellular telephones, help is just a a few buttons
away and no one feels completely isolated. In my day, and you had to
carry maps to determine where you were in the world. Now most phones
have GPS and you can determine where you are with the click. So now
folks are more connected, but at the same time are more dependent on
each other. We gave up some degree of our independence for the
luxury of communication. My grandson's world's is quite different
from mine when I was his age. There are advantages and
disadvantages, but I hope he will develop some of the independent
character that was so important in my day. The more dependent you
become on society, the less able you are to deal with emergencies.
And part of the planning for the future is to allow for emergencies
that will develop. If our country ever has a cyber attack, and we
somehow lose our generating power, we will need to be more
independent, each one of us. So I try to prepare for an emergency
hoping that it never occurs and try to convey my grandson, what
knowledge he may need.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Oh, for the good old day when the Whigs
were in power. Or when Lincoln was here or Teddy Roosevelt was here
or Eisenhower was here. How did the Republicans come to be this bad?

Obstruction remains the Republicans'
main political strategy. And their control of the House and the use
of the filibuster in the Senate, enable them to cripple our governing
process.

Helping people see that our governmental dysfunction
is a deliberate choice the Republicans are making is a good starting
place, building as it does on the concerns of citizens -- Republicans
and Democrats alike -- over the stalemate in Congress. But that's
just one piece in a very big picture that Americans need to see.

" Income and wealth inequality are wider than at any time in
living memory, yet Republicans are helping to widen that gap.

" The country is still devastated by the aftereffects of a
financial collapse, yet Republicans are working to prevent the
restoration of the kinds of regulations that kept our financial
system stable for seventy years.

" 97 % of the top
scientists in the climate field agree that climate disruption may
pose the greatest challenge in human history, and we're already
seeing costly consequences, yet Republicans have made it party dogma
that the scientists are wrong and that nothing, or little, should be
done.

" Getting Americans back to work should be our top
economic priority, yet Republicans block programs to add jobs while
insisting on austerity policies that have thrown additional hundreds
of thousands of Americans out of work.

When today's
Republicans are out of power, they try to prevent anything good from
being done. But when they were in power, they gave us a presidency
(2001-2009) that was perhaps the most damaging in our history:

" two wars of choice, one under false pretenses;

"
officially sanctioned torture;

" more assaults on the
Constitution and the rule of law than by any previous presidency

" an economy in the worst shape
since the Great Depression;

" the inflaming of
divisions among Americans;

" hostility toward America
among citizens of nations that have historically been our friends.

Friday, June 14, 2013

You bring all your produce to me and
I'll give each of you a basket of vegetables for your efforts.

As I build up wealth, I will build
factories and your children can work in them for me.

With the increased wealth that I will
amass with your labor, I can acquire more fields and more factories.

You can be thankful to me for providing
you with a livelihood, as long as you can keep producing for me.
Once you can no longer be a productive member of my organization, you
are no longer welcome.

My children will start off with the
accumulated wealth that I leave to them and they will be able to
amass even greater wealth. That will leave the rest you with less,
but that's your worry, not mine.

Eventually this system will result in a
completely top-heavy society with all the wealth owned by only a few
super rich and powerful people and the rest of us.

In 2006, a UN report revealed that the
world’s richest 1% own 40% of the world’s wealth, and the world’s
richest 10% accounted for roughly 85% of the planet's total assets,
while the bottom half of the population – more than 3 billion
people – owned less than 1% of the world’s wealth.

Monday, June 10, 2013

On the Liberal side:
Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party now controls
both legislative chambers and the governor’s office for the first time
in more than two decades. The legislative session that ended a few weeks
ago resulted in a hike in the top income tax rate to 9.85%, an
increased cigarette tax, and the elimination of several corporate tax
loopholes. The added revenues will be used to expand early-childhood
education, freeze tuitions at state universities, fund jobs and economic
development, and reduce the state budget deficit. Along the way,
Minnesota also legalized same-sex marriage and expanded the power of
trade unions to organize.

On the Conservative side:
The biggest controversy in Kansas is between Governor Sam Brownback, who
wants to shift taxes away from the wealthy and onto the middle class
and poor by repealing the state’s income tax and substituting an
increase in the sales tax, and Kansas legislators who want to cut the
sales tax as well, thereby reducing the state’s already paltry spending
for basic services. Kansas recently cut its budget for higher education
by almost 5 percent.

Meanwhile:
The Tea Party has basically shut Congress down. Their refusal to compromise is working
just as they hoped: No jobs agenda. No budget. No grand bargain on the
deficit. No background checks on guns. Nothing on climate change. No tax
reform. No hike in the minimum wage. Nothing so far on immigration
reform.
It’s as if an entire branch of the federal government — the branch
that’s supposed to deal directly with the nation’s problems, not just
execute the law or interpret the law but make the law — has gone out of
business, leaving behind only a so-called “sequester” that’s cutting
deeper and deeper into education, infrastructure, programs for the
nation’s poor, and national defense.

A great nation requires a great, or at least functional, national
government. The Tea Partiers and other government-haters who have caused
Washington to all but close because they refuse to compromise are
threatening all that we aspire to be together.

Saturday, June 01, 2013

The recovery isn't happening. I'm afraid the next downturn could be very bad.

Official unemployment hovers around 8
percent, but if you count the people who are forced to work
part-time, or who have been dropped from the rolls because they’ve
been looking for a job for a month or longer, the numbers jump to
anywhere from 15 to 23 percent of the population.

During the downturn, 78.7 percent of
the jobs lost were either mid-wage or high-wage jobs like paralegals,
carpenters, nurses, and accountants. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, three out of five newly created jobs are part-time,
low-wage jobs with little opportunity for advancement.

Roughly one in ten families, and one in
four children, remained dependent on food stamps.

Corporate America might be recovering,
but working people aren’t. For corporate America to recover, the
rest of us have to take a pay cut or lose our job, our pension, our
health insurance, our home, our time with our family. Recovered
profits aren’t trickling down to create decent jobs or pay workers
back for concessions.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

I get tired of being against things. It
leaves you in a negative mood when all you can complain about are
things that upset you. I get tired of politicians who were against
something all the time. I want to be for something. I want
politicians who are for something. I want politicians like Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders who are positive in what they want to do.
They will mention some of the things that are wrong but they will
also speak of the things that can be done to correct the situation.
It seems so many of the Republicans are against anything but you
don't hear what they are for. I know that many of the Republicans are
against Obama care but I don't hear a positive replacement for that.
I know that many of the Republicans are against the EPA and OSHA but
they don't spell out how they would replace those entities. They
complain about waste and the government and they somehow believe that
private enterprise could replace that more efficiently but they offer
no example of when that has happened. We've seen the privatization of
much of the military, particularly in the support area. But I'm not
sure that they received any money by hiring this out to private
enterprise and lobbied acquaintances. When we privatize some of our
services there is no incentive for that service to be more efficient
or cost less in fact just the opposite occurs because the more it
costs the more they make. When I was in construction you made more
money from the changes to the contract then you made from the
original contract. So right now the emphasis is on performing the
work through private enterprise instead of public employees which
presents a method to reward lackeys. And we very seldom punish our
suppliers for not being cost-efficient. In fact they end up making
more money correcting the errors that they themselves brought on.

But here I am being negative again and
that isn't what I meant to do. I think I am just like the majority of
the American citizens who have been waiting now for several years for
Congress to act. We want some positive steps taken to help our
economy to help our jobs. Instead always gotten delaying actions in
and balking against doing anything productive. They want to point
fingers at each other instead of moving forward with plans for the
future. Meanwhile the average citizen is losing ground. Homes are
worth less than they used to be, and jobs are more scarce, education
costs more, food costs have risen, health care costs have risen,
payee has stagnated and all Congress can do is block each other.
Congress seems to be only responding to the wealthy backers.
Corporations and banks seem to be controlling our country and the
wishes of the citizens are ignored. Even our Democratic president,
who talks a good talk, doesn't follow through for the common man.
Something will have to change.

Right now politics is controlled by the
wealthy and we are offered only those candidates who can obtain
monies from the wealthy in order to run their campaign. So our choice
is to take their left hand or the right hand with no other option. We
lose going in. Now that the wealthy also control the courts and
corporations are now recognized by the courts as having personal
rights and the ability to pump money into politics we can only look
forward to more and more of the same. Meanwhile certain wealthy
individuals or organizations control the news media and we only get
the filtered news that they wish us to have. Much of the news is
biased and opinionated and often controlled by the whims and
decisions of the wealthy. Many people still believe that the news as
presented on the various channels but they don't know that the news
has been selectively chosen for certain desired effect. I'm not sure
when the public will wake up discover that we've lost control of our
own country.

Every once in a while you have a Bernie
Sanders pop-up or an Elizabeth Warren which gives a spark of hope but
their voices often get drowned out by the cacophony of the machine
politics. Something will have to change and hopefully soon.

Thursday, May 02, 2013

A person is lucky to get 7 dozen years
and some even get 8 dozen, but not too many.

The first dozen years go by slowly as
we learn to speak and walk and run and sing and pass through grade
school. By the end of my first dozen years I was through 7th
grade and through Cub Scouts and ready for high school.

The second dozen years go by more
quickly as we pass through high school and have our first love and
learn to drive and to work and to share with others. Some of us go
on to college while some go into military and others begin to work.
Some of us get married and start our families.

The third dozen years find us buying
our first home and establishing our work history, raising our kids,
finding our path through life. Some of us end up changing our paths
with divorce or changing jobs or changing locations. The years are
passing much quicker.

The fourth dozen years find us more
mature and looked upon more as leaders in our groups. Our children
are growing up and finding their way into life. We are starting to
look ahead towards our future retirement. Our bodies are starting to
give us a little more trouble as we have worn them with little regard
for the passing years. The years pass by almost before we realize
them.

The fifth dozen years are the winding
down years in our professions. Our families have grown and left and
we find little room for change at this point in our lives. We are
more accepting of the situations we find ourselves in and are
contemplating retirement.

The sixth dozen years find us retired
and a little less healthy. We have learned much over the years and
have much more wisdom than we had earlier, but our opinion carries
less weight in the community at large. The past dozen years have
brought tremendous technical changes in our world, but we have
memories of simpler times and find the modern times a bit
bewildering. Where did the years go?

We are still the young people we once
were, in our minds, with much more wisdom to share, but our bodies
are not keeping up with our mental facilities. We now know that the
end approaches and that we won't leave a lasting legacy for the
future generations, but we will try to set an example for our
children and grandchildren to follow.

The seventh dozen years are mellow
years with little expectation and more enjoyment of the simpler joys.
We have done our best and have made it this far and now we can enjoy
the sunsets and the breezes and not worry about the future we won't
see. The present is enough and the years have flown by far too
quickly with many unnoticed. The memories are good and those
memories that once hurt are now diffused with the glow of years gone
by. We remember only the good and have no bitterness for what might
have been.

It has been a good life and I enjoyed the experiences. Each dozen had its own flavor and contributed to the mix.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Once
again, the President is turning his back on the base, caving in to
Congressional right-wingers and corporate special interests.

The
administration’s undermining of civil liberties, scant action on
climate change, huge escalation of war in Afghanistan, expansion of
drone warfare, austerity policies serving Wall Street and shafting
Main Street, vast deference to corporate power. . . The list is long
and chilling.

From
this spring onward, a wide range of progressive groups should be
prepared to work together to effectively renounce Obama’s
leadership.

This
spring, there’s a lot of work beckoning for progressives who mean
business about gaining electoral power for social movements; who have
no intention of eliding the grim realities of the Obama presidency;
who are more than fed up with false pretenses that Obama is some kind
of ally of progressives; who recognize that Obama has served his last
major useful purpose for progressives by blocking a Romney-Ryan
regime from entering the White House; who are willing to be here now,
in this historical moment, to organize against and polarize with the
Obama administration in basic terms; and who, looking ahead, grasp
the tragic folly of leaving the electoral field to battles between
right-wing Republicans and Democrats willing to go along with the
kind of destructive mess that President Obama has been serving up.

A
song by Tony Bennett:

“And
maybe tomorrow I'll find what I'm afterI'll
throw off my sorrow, beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughterWith
you I could learn to, with you what a new dayBut
who can I turn to if you turn away?”

Thursday, April 11, 2013

THE
FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION OPENED UP COMMUNIST CHINA FOR CORPORATE
EXPANSION, WHICH ENDED UP ELIMINATING THE MIDDLE CLASS IN THE UNITED
STATES AND EVENTUALLY REDUCING IT TO A THIRD WORLD POWER (AFTER THE
UPCOMING CRASH). THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNET HELPED SPEED UP THE
TRANSFER OF PROFESSIONAL SERVICES AND GLOBALIZATION OF ALL TRADES AND
PROFESSIONS. INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM HAS BEEN REPLACED BY FINANCIAL
CAPITALIZATION AND BANKS RULE GOVERNMENTS.

Thoughts expressed on the internet:

What
happened economically because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the rise of the high speed internet is that it made it possible for
Western corporations (corporations in the United States, Europe) to
arbitrage labor across national borders.

In
other words, when the Soviets collapsed, it had a big impact on
thinking in Communist China and Socialist India. Their response to
the failure of the Soviet Union was to open their vast, underutilized
labor to Western capital. So the corporations found out that they
could produce for their home market offshore in India or China,
dramatically drop the labor cost, and thereby dramatically increase
the profits flowing in capital gains to shareholders and in
performance bonuses to executives.

So
the collapse of the Soviet Union began the arbitrage of of labor, and
it ended up separating Americans from the production of the goods and
services that they consume. The economy has been dead in the water
ever since, and the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan tried to
substitute - for the missing growth in consumer income in employment
- consumer indebtedness. So we had the rise in consumer indebtedness,
the real estate bubble, the various financial frauds, and the ongoing
financial crisis as well as increasing unemployment.

The
manufacturing goods were produced offshore and sent in. What the
high speed internet allowed the corporations to do was to offshore
the production of professional services, such as software
engineering, information technology; and now, of course, research,
design. They could hire people in India to do this work, and they
could send it in on the high speed internet, and so we have seen the
employment for Americans in rapidly growing fields such as software
engineering and information technology simply dry up. The work is now
done offshore and sent in on the internet. So the consequence of
Soviet collapse was to destroy American manufacturing jobs, and to
destroy professional service jobs that had always been the ladder of
upward mobility for American university graduates.

"Don't
look for a job that can be outsourced by the internet." Even
radiologists are being outsourced.; so if you get an x-ray, they send
the results to India to have a radiologist in India do it instead of
an American doctor doing it.

It's
certainly the case that innovation follows manufacturing. If you're
not manufacturing things, you're out of touch, and you don't know
what to innovate, or how to innovate.if
you're not making things, you don't know what to innovate. You get
out of touch with technologies. You become a Third World Country. We
now see from all the surveys that increasingly, American corporations
innovate outside the country where their offshore plants are.

So
if the American manufacturing worker costs $22 an hour (with all the
benefits, and so forth), and the Chinese at the time this started
cost 25c an hour, you have an amazing labor cost difference.
And so they look at this and they say: "Well, wow! We could
really drop our cost of production by producing with this Chinese
labor, because instead of twenty-five bucks an hour, it's twenty five
cents." That's what we mean by labor arbitrage. They just say,
"OK, we're not hiring these Americans, we're going to hire the
Chinese." That's labor arbitrage. The job offshoring was
undermining employment opportunities in the United States, and
certainly had stopped the rise in consumer income.

The
main function of globalism is to de-industrialize high-wage countries
that are developed.

The
other main result of globalism is to turn lesser developed countries
that had viable agriculture and were self-sustaining, to turn them
into monocultures; supplying like one crop for global markets, and
then that makes them -- first of all, that destroys the
economic-social systems there, and people now are dependent on food
imports. The big farms, of course, haven't room for much of the
population that used to be on sustainable farms. So globalism is a
wrecking force of amazing power to wreck. It doesn't do
anything good except for shareholders of big corporations and their
managers, or chief executives.

So
there's no longer - governments don't represent the people anymore.
In Europe, they represent the very powerful private banks, and
they're going to be sure they don't lose any money; so that
shareholders in the banks are being made whole by, in the case of
Cyprus, seizing some share of the bank deposits of depositors. And
what they did in Greece, they cut wages and salaries, they cut
pensions, they cut social services, they sold off public assets like
water companies to private companies, who then doubled the price, and
then that way the suppressed the living standards of the Greek people
in order to pay off bankers, so that the shareholders of the banks
didn't lose any money.

"The
Right is correct that government power is the problem, and the Left
is correct that private power is the problem. Therefore, whether
power is located within the government or private sectors cannot
reduce, constrain, or minimize power. " And you talked about how
the Founding Fathers had a solution, that it didn't work, and now
we've got accumulation of new dictatorial powers in the Executive
Branch in the name of protecting us from terrorists, and with
deregulation's creation of powerful corporations to big to fail.

the
two political parties. But they're not necessarily identified with
Right Wing and Left Wing. What happened to the Democrats was the
offshoring of the manufacturing jobs destroyed the power of the labor
unions and the ability to finance the Democratic party. See, the
Democrats were financed by labor, the Republicans were financed by
business, and so there was countervailing power. They could contain
one another. Neither side could go too far away from some sort of
balance. But when the unions lost all these manufacturing jobs, and
former cities which were powerhouses in manufacturing just dried up
and disappeared, the Democrats then had to go to the same sources of
financing as the Republicans. So now, both parties are dependent on
the same financing, and this then has made it easy for the
corporations to control both parties!

What's
happening though is that it's failing. It doesn't work for the
industrial countries, it works for China, who gets all the
offshored production, and so American GDP becomes Chinese GDP, and
American jobs become Chinese jobs, and American consumer income
becomes Chinese consumer income. What's happening is the balance of
power in the world is shifting completely away from the West. It's
washed up.

So,
the more trade agreements that Obama and any President signs, they're
basically accelerating the transition of power to China And India and
other former third World countries, but they're the rising countries
now - the BriC countries.

The
Chinese manufacturing force is 112 million. The American force is
Eleven million. Eleven!

Is
it possible if we could find and elect a leader who said "My
first step as the new President is to cancel these global trade
agreements." Would that be possible, if they were able to stand
up to all these different people?

It
can't happen for the reason that right now it serves the interest for
the power, so they're not going to overturn it. Now, when it becomes
apparent that we've destroyed ourselves, you can't get the power
back. You think the Chinese are going let you all of a sudden let you
overcome this? No. They'll hold the upper hand. They're not going to
say "OK, let's now destroy ourselves the way the Americans
destroyed themselves." I think it's all over with for the West.
I don't think they can come back, and so what we're going to be in is
a period of transition in which the West becomes no longer the ruler
of the universe. It will be slowly declining. In fact, the collapse
could be sudden.

The dollar is one of the biggest bubbles in history. The Federal
Reserve is creating over a trillion new dollars annually, but the
demand for dollars is not rising by a trillion annually. And so,
sooner or later, this has to affect the price of the dollar, that is,
the exchange value. And we already see the important nations moving
to decouple from the dollar.We have the BriCs: this is China, Russia, Brazil, India, South
Africa. Altogether now, that's probably about half the world's
population. And it's probably half of the traded goods (laughs). And
so they're setting up a system in which they settle their trade with
one another in their own currencies. The dollar is no longer used as
a reserve currency. They're setting up their own version of an IMF.
They're just going to bypass all the Western institutions. We see in
China and Asia the rise of an Asian currency bloc, which is being
organized around the Chinese currency. We see deals with Japan and
China to settle their trade with one another in their own currencies.So the demand and use for the dollar is about to rapidly
constrict. We'll have a situation where the Feds are not only
creating a trillion new dollars more than the demand is growing, but
the demand will be shrinking! And so the thing will blow up. And when
the dollar bubble pops, so does the bond market bubble, the stock
market bubble. We will have the biggest economic catastrophe in the
history of the world, and there is no solution. The United States
will go from being a so-called superpower to a nothing!It could happen at any time. It's a perfect storm that the idiot
policy makers have created because they don't serve the public
interest, they serve a few rich bankers. The whole thing has been
keyed toward protecting the banks that our deregulation policy
allowed to get to big to fail. Not only that, but the public
officials, the Secretary of the Treasury, the FED, the financial
regulatory agency heads, they're all the former bankers themselves,
all their proteges. You have a situation where the class that caused
the crisis is running the solution, and the solution is to keep the
banks from having any pain; what it does to the rest of us is not
their concern.

Because the people running the policy
are not individual rich people: they are the very large financial
institutions. They may finance billionaires in some scheme a
billionaire has, but the power is Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase,
Citibank, Bank of America. It's these financial institutions, they
have financialized the economy. Industrial Capitalism is over and
done with. We have Financial Capitalism, and what they do is, they
organize a whole economy so that all the surplus is drawn off in
interest paid to banks. You can see it happening in Greece, Spain,
Italy, Ireland, Cypress and spreading into other countries of the
world. One day, soon, it will happen in the United States.

Saturday, March 02, 2013

Just Dumb

Sequester: “A Fancy Word for a Dumb Idea”

That’s what the President of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, called the sequester — and he’s absolutely right.

Republicans have once again shown that they’ll do almost anything to protect the wealthy and special interests like Big Oil — no matter the cost to the rest of us and to the economy. This time, they have allowed devastating across-the-board spending cuts to kick in.

Just yesterday, the Senate voted on a balanced plan to replace this year’s indiscriminate cuts with a mix of targeted cuts and new revenues from ending loopholes for the very wealthiest Americans and corporate special interests. This plan got 52 votes and should have passed but Republicans blocked it by insisting on a 60-vote margin.

It’s clear that Republicans would rather impose painful spending cuts that will hurt the economy and millions of Americans than end a single tax loophole for the wealthy and special interests like Big Oil and Wall Street.

As a reminder, here’s a list of things Republicans apparently prefer to happen instead of eliminating wasteful giveaways in the tax code:

70,000 kids will get kicked off of Head Start

10,000 teacher jobs will be at risk

7,200 special education teachers, aides, and staff could be cut

Nearly 140,000 fewer children will receive life-saving vaccinations

Up to 373,000 seriously mentally ill adults and seriously emotionally disturbed children could go untreated

2,100 fewer food inspections will take place

Tax returns and refunds will be delayed

The long-term unemployed will see their benefits cut by about 10 percent

Nearly a billion dollars in loans to small businesses cut

It could take several hours to get through security at the airport

More than 100 airports might have to simply close down

Our military leaders have said it would weaken our national security

The Secretary of Homeland Security said the cuts will make it harder to protect the country from a terror attack and that the border will be less secure

Not all these things will happen overnight, but they will happen. And the longer the sequester goes on, the worse things will get. Worse yet, unless a permanent replacement is agreed to, these painful and damaging cuts will continue for nine years.

BOTTOM LINE: Instead of standing by and watching as our economy and millions of Americans are hurt by these irresponsible and devastating cuts, Republicans need to agree to reduce our deficit with the kind of responsible, balanced approach that three-quarters of Americans prefer. Their reckless behavior got us into this mess in 2011 and now it’s time for them to come back to the table and help get us out of it before the worst impacts of these indiscriminate cuts happen.